Despite FITARA’s one-year anniversary, the law continues to present challenges for Chief Information Officers (CIO) and their agencies. To that end, FCW hosted an executive roundtable in early December to discuss the one-year anniversary of the enactment. Similarly, an additional benefit to the roundtable is the much needed CIO perspective on the practical realities of the law and its implementation.

We wanted to take a moment to wish all our readers a very happy holiday from the ModernGOV editorial team and everyone at Software AG Government Solutions. We hope your season is filled with joy, peace, family and fun.

Our thanks go out to America’s public sector employees, wherever they may be this holiday season. We are incredibly thankful for your efforts, and look forward to providing you with more strategies for managing data and putting it to work to help your agency meet its mission.

Rest assured our break will be short – ModernGOV will be back next week with more new content. Until then, have a happy holiday celebration.

It would not be a stretch to say that Richard McKinney appreciates the intent of the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act.

McKinney, the CIO at the U.S. Department of Transportation, told an audience at the MeriTalk FITARA Forum in December that the law will help him provide a real cost-benefit analysis when assessing the potential impact of an IT procurement.

Last month, some of the brightest minds in the IT business got together at the Adobe Coldfusion Summit to exchange ideas and best practices on how to successfully deliver web applications to market. One of the defining themes of this year’s summit was how best to address issues of speed and scalability – the two most common complaints for both web application developers and end users.

There are plenty of challenges facing the exploitation of Big Data by the federal government – from the quality and reliability of the data to the many disparate systems on which information is stored. But the challenges are common to most federal agencies, not unique to each one.

Data is data and at its most basic level, it is merely lines of code. However, we continue to become more and more connected each day, with 40% of the world’s population online and 1.75 billion of us using smart phones every day. Those in the business world as well as in the public sector are striving to determine how best to utilize Big Data, and by extension Big Data Analytics, to improve efficiency and mitigate cost.

High Performance Computing (HPC) is more than a faster form of computing. The added power of a high performance system can enable great things to happen like researchers developing a new alloy design for better gas mileage or a scientist solving the world’s greatest problems, like the global water shortage.